The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and SEO

Are you looking to get started blogging or find a few good ways to increase your traffic? One of the first steps is to identify your target audience. What topics do your readers care about? You can also discover breaking trends to write about using Google’s Hot Trends, Technorati, Twitter and even Facebook’s new Trending section.

Starting with your ideas for discussion, you can then start to generate some potent keywords and phrases using free tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner and Soovle. You ought to place these keywords strategically throughout your title, URL permalink, sections, image alt text, categories and tags to increase the SEO strength of your articles. Other important things to do in the post itself include adding internal links to other relevant posts (with good keyword-optimized anchor text), using proper h1 and h2 header tags and HTML markup. You should also make yourself easy to follow on all your important social media profiles to simultaneously build your audience on other networks too. Also be sure to set up your Google+ authorship for each blog you write on, as this will increase your organic traffic by appearing more often in search (when your friends on Google+ search for items you’ve written about) along with your thumbnail photo appearing in the results which grabs more attention than links without it.

When you are ready to post, it’s time to get social. Promote your content on all your social media profiles of choice and try to participate in a few relevant forums, LinkedIn groups or other blogging communities also interested in your topic. Finally, blogging and content marketing isn’t an exact science so always look to measure what is working using tools like Google Analytics, and keep making improvements!